I've sat through enough logo presentations to last several lifetimes. The agency presents three options — safe, bold, and "the one we actually want you to pick" — and the room debates whether the kerning properly expresses the company's values.
Meanwhile, the customer service line is on hold; The product arrives late; The return policy requires a PhD to understand.
A logo is a bookmark, not the book. It marks where a brand lives in someone's mind, but it doesn't write the story that determines whether they'll return to that page.
Apple's logo could be a pomegranate and people would still queue overnight for their products. Because what they've built isn't about the fruit on the box — it's about the experience of opening it, using it, showing it to others.
Titan didn't become India's watch brand because of their logo. They became it because they made buying a watch feel like an occasion. Air-conditioned stores when most retail was street-side. Trained staff. Warranty cards that actually meant something. The logo just marked the place where all that reliability lived.
I've watched brands spend months on logo redesigns while their actual brand experience — the one customers live through every day — remains untouched. It's like repainting a car that won't start.
The uncomfortable truth? Our logos will only ever be as good as everything else we do. A beautiful mark on a terrible service is just a prettier way to be forgotten. And a simple mark on remarkable service becomes iconic by association.
Which isn't to say logos don't matter. They do. But they matter last, not first. First comes the work — the actual, unglamorous, Tuesday-morning work of being a brand worth marking.